SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 November 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 27 November 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
Compton, D G
(1930-2023) UK author, born of parents who were both in the theatre; he increasingly lived in the USA after 1981. As Guy Compton, he published some unremarkable detective novels, beginning with Too Many Murderers (1962), and as by Frances Lynch produced some nonfantastic Gothics throughout his career; but soon turned to sf with tales almost always set in the Near Future, and anatomizing moral dilemmas within that arena: the future is very clearly ...
Hertzka, Theodor
(1845-1924) Austrian economist and author of the influential socialist Utopia, Freiland: Ein Sociales Zukunftsbild (1890; trans Arthur Ransom – clearly not the writer and translator Arthur Ransome – as Freeland: A Social Anticipation 1891) and its sequel, Eine Reise nach Freiland (1893; trans anon as A Visit to Freeland, or The New Paradise Regained 1894; rev ...
Cartmel, Andrew
(1958- ) UK computer worker, author and Television script editor for the 24th-26th seasons (1987-1989) of Doctor Who, covering Sylvester McCoy's stint as the Seventh Doctor. Cartmel went on to write a number of novels Tied to this and other series. His standalone novel The Wise (1999) is a supernatural tale. / The couple of years prior to Cartmel's appointment had not ...
Science Fiction Adventures
Title used on two US Digest-size magazines during the 1950s, and on one UK magazine that began as a reprint and continued, using original material, after its parent – the second US magazine – folded. The title was used also as a variant title of Science Fiction Classics, January-May 1973, September and November 1974. / 1. The first US magazine published nine issues November 1952 to June 1954. #1 was ...
Bennett, Robert Jackson
(1984- ) US author whose first novel, Mr Shivers (2010), a supernatural thriller, plunges into what would become his dominant focus of interest: the Matter of America. In this tale, a man whose child has been murdered becomes a hobo in order to track down the eponymous creature responsible for this and other similar deaths, riding the rails of 1930s America in his quest for "justice" (see Crime and Punishment); ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...